Note (return) — Chapter I

Clubs were established in London, not so much for the sake of the cheapness and convenience of common sitting-rooms and kitchens, as to bring together bodies of men, each of whom should meet all the rest on terms of unrestrained social intercourse. One can see in Thackeray's Book of Snobs, and in the stories of Thackeray's own club quarrels, the difficulties produced by this plan. Nowadays clubs are successful exactly because it is an unwritten law in almost every one of them that no member must speak to any other who is not one of his own personal acquaintances. The innumerable communistic experiments of Fourier, Robert Owen, and others, all broke up essentially because of the want of privacy. The associates got on each other's nerves. In those confused pages of the Politics, in which Aristotle criticises from the point of view of experience the communism of Plato, the same point stands out: 'It is difficult to live together in community,' communistic colonists have always 'disputed with each other about the most ordinary matters'; 'we most often disagree with those slaves who are brought into daily contact with us.'[10]